Bought the UX31A (but with 256GB SSD) for use while I'm travelling on vacation. Owned it for the best part of 3 months now.
Wake-from-sleep time on this, assuming I don't have large apps open, is as near to instant matters. It's awake before I can move my hands to the Keyboard type in my password. This is on the base Windows 7 install it shipped with.
In terms of needing to run VMs - it doesn't really have enough RAM to be doing this (4GB, not upgradeable), but an external USB3 HDD would probably work. USB3 is stupidly fast.
The track-pad works quite well for me. My biggest annoyances with the laptop is the crummy/non-existant palm-rejection for the trackpad, and it's multi-touch zoom/pinch detection.
However, these complaints apply equally to a 2011 Macbook Pro 15" too (had one at my previous job).
The second biggest complaint, is the lack of RAM, and it's inability to be upgraded. If I could've put 8 or 16GB in it, I'd have done that. It'd also remove the 5-10 second delays that I get when I've got multiple huge photos open.

I've been chasing the perfect PC laptop for over a decade now. Though I've tolerated lugging around five to seven pound machines because I had to, laptops were always about portability first and most of all to me. I quickly gravitated to so-called ultraportable laptops as soon as they became ...